Site Mobile Navigation

A Visionary of Balletic Folk Dance Turns 100

When Igor Moiseyev -- choreographer, genius and innovator -- once told me that ballet technique was essential to all professional dancing, he revealed the clue to his creativity.

With English grammar, he said, you could write like Dickens but also like Hemingway. Similarly, ballet training was a movement grammar to be used onstage in different ways.

Mr. Moiseyev, who celebrates his 100th birthday today in Moscow, chose to "write" like Igor Moiseyev. Ostensibly a folk ensemble, the Moiseyev Dance Company, which he founded in 1937 and still directs, is actually a ballet-trained group of professional dancers whose focus is on folk material.

As the New York Times dance critic John Martin shrewdly wrote after the company's United States debut in 1958, "No folk ever danced like this."

And this is true not only because of Mr. Moiseyev's pioneering acrobatic bravura, with men rotating not once but twice in barrel turns in the air, or the whirlwind speed of the women, wrapped in their costumes' blur of colors.

No folk ever danced like this because Mr. Moiseyev, a Bolshoi-trained disciple of the avant-garde choreographer Kasyan Goleizovsky, turned his company into his own creative and artistic outlet. Millions have thrilled to the rainbow of brilliant folk traditions that he has cast in a dazzling theatrical light.

Authentic folk dancing is not a spectator sport. The viewer's impulse is to join in or, if not, to feel excluded. Mr. Moiseyev made the raw material theatrical, and in doing so, he extended the art of choreography as a whole.

That is his major achievement. He has developed the expressive image in dance, and he captures the essence of any subject he touches.

This is easiest to see when Mr. Moiseyev departs from the dances of the former Soviet Union and applies his magic wand to material from abroad, ranging from an intimate distillation of a Chinese opera scene to the vibrant mass fireworks of a Spanish jota.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

In cold war times, Mr. Moiseyev ran into trouble for glorifying rock 'n' roll. But those of us who saw his good-natured spoof on gyrating American teenagers knew that he had been misread. Here again, he had captured the ethos of the age, a time of change.

Obviously it was safer for the Moiseyev Dance Company to end its performances, as it sometimes still does, with a hands-across-the-sea American square dance to the tune of "Turkey in the Straw."

There are those for whom the company, throughout the Soviet era, was always an instrument of Soviet propaganda, showing only happy peasants and heroic exploits. And yet last year at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the group was still rousing viewers to their feet with some of the same dances and a few new ones. For the first time, a Moiseyev Dance Company program featured a work by a guest, the Korean choreographer Pe In Su.

Soviet propaganda without the Soviet Union? If the Moiseyev dances have survived, it is because their artistic quality lifted them above any possible propaganda level.

Mr. Moiseyev's genius has been for carefully observed detail. In a remarkable passage in "Perpetuum Mobile," a 1967 Soviet documentary, he becomes exasperated with his dancers and demonstrates stamping steps as he wants them done. In 1989 in Moscow I saw the teenagers in his school execute a breathtaking series of innovative exercises at the barre.

It is useful to remember that Mr. Moiseyev, who was born in Kiev and studied ballet in Moscow as a teenager, was in the company of rule-breakers in the 1920's. He was a regular at the literary salon of Anatoly Lunacharsky, the dance lover who invited Isadora Duncan to start a school when he was Minister of Enlightenment.

Goleizovsky, the highly experimental choreographer who was also George Balanchine's mentor, cast Mr. Moiseyev in leading roles in his ballets. Later, when Mr. Moiseyev was a choreographer of contemporary ballets, his career at the Bolshoi was stopped by a conservative ballet establishment. Fortunately, for us.